Sunday, 10 May 2015

At 58, I have reached legitimate anecdotage. My parents read Grimm’s
Fairy Tales out to me at bedtime, but my maternal grandmother from
Moratuwa told me stories in Sinhala and was the only one to do so. She
related Martin Wickremesinghe’s story “Rohini” to me. It is a romantic
martial tale set within the Dutugemunu saga. She couldn’t have been a
Sinhala Buddhist chauvinist. She was a Catholic, originally from Nuwara
Eliya, married to a highly literate Buddhist from Panadura. She named
her favorite son Athula, after one of Dutugemunu’s warrior-heroes. Far
from being a recessive Sinhala xenophobe, Athula wound up a Dean in a
North American university and the first non-white President of the World
Confederation of Physiotherapists. Those are some part of my roots.
That’s where I’m coming from.

Patriotism is love of country. There is dumb patriotism and there is
smart patriotism. When the dumb patriot says “my country right or
wrong”, he/she means that whether it does right or wrong in the moral
sense, he/she will defend it. When the smart patriot says it, he/she
means that whether it is in the right or in the wrong, it is his/her
country; the only country she really has or belongs to. It is where he
is coming from. It is the place he identifies with. It is where he is
rooted. It is home. He will not defend everything its government or
state does; but defend the country, he will. In that sense the smart
patriot loves his/her country unconditionally though it may be a ‘tough
love’. Obviously in the case of dual citizenship, this applies twice
over, with its necessary modifications and complications.

The dumb patriot thinks his country is the best in the world and even
the greatest. The smart patriot does not and his love of country is not
based on blind faith or an intrinsic, unwarranted sense of superiority.
The smart patriot is constructively critical about his country but is
fiercely loyal to it all the same. He will criticize it but will
unconditionally defend his country from the hypocritical criticism of
foreign powers and institutions responsible for or blind to far worse
crimes.
Nationalism is an ideology born of love of nation. It recognizes and
respects a collective identity. It often results in political projects
sourced in the interests of that nation. Neither patriotism nor
nationalism need be recognized as the highest values. Nationalism can be
unproblematic when there is only one nation in a country. It is far
more problematic when there are multiple, often competing claims to
nationhood within a country.

Patriotism and nationalism are far from coterminous with chauvinism
and/or racism. Chauvinism is a hierarchic narcissism. It is intensely
self-centered and self-referential. It regards its own nation as
intrinsically higher and superior to others. It brooks no critical
interrogation of its past or present. Racism is the aggressive, even
violent extension of chauvinism. It is actively hostile to others; to
those apart from its own collective. Racism stands for the
subordination and suppression of other communities.

There are patriots and nationalists who are oblivious to chauvinism
and racism. There are anti-racists and anti-chauvinists who are
dismissive of patriotism and nationalism. I advocate neither and am
neither.

I stand for a patriotism that is compatible with both nationalism and
internationalism. I stand for a nationalism that is compatible with
internationalism. This is smart patriotism. Smart patriotism is
perfectly compatible with cultural cosmopolitanism, though the latter is
not a condition of the former.
However, neither patriotism nor nationalism is compatible with
political cosmopolitanism. The difference between cultural and political
cosmopolitanism is that political cosmopolitanism does not respect
national borders and national sovereignty while cultural cosmopolitanism
does. Cultural cosmopolitanism embraces the world as a cultural melting
pot; it celebrates diversity, interface and fusion; it is truly global.
It also respects the sovereignty of countries and nations and opposes
the hegemony, intervention and interference of the superpower over the
rest and into the rest.
Lakshman Kadirgamar was a cultural cosmopolitan and a political
patriot who recognized and leveraged nationalism, including Sinhala
nationalism, in the cause of anti-elitism and anti-Western hegemonism.

I am a Sri Lankan patriot who is also an internationalist. I am a Sri
Lankan patriot who recognizes that you cannot be a Sri Lankan patriot
while being opposed to Sinhala nationalism. Indeed a Sri Lankan patriot
has by definition to recognize Sinhala nationalism and its centrality.
The main motive force of Sri Lankan patriotism is Sinhala nationalism
but it is not the exclusive force or component within Sri Lankan
patriotism.

I firmly believe that a patriot must oppose chauvinism and racism. I
also believe that one must never confuse nationalism with chauvinism or
racism. I am a Sri Lanka patriot. Within the ensemble of identities and
affiliations that constitute me, I am also a Sinhala nationalist who
detests Sinhala racism and chauvinism. That is why I supported Premadasa
and Mahinda Rajapaksa while opposing the JHU and the BBS.

Patriotism and nationalism are quite different from xenophobia.
Xenophobia resents any external influences on one’s culture. Nationalism
recognizes that one’s culture is the product also of external flows and
influences and welcomes these while protecting the country’s political
sovereignty from external domination.

Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism strives to establish a dominant place for
that majority at the expense of the minorities and attempts to keep the
minorities in a subordinate place. That is reprehensible and must be
combatted. Sri Lankan patriotism and Sinhala nationalism attempt no such
thing. Sri Lankan patriotism only wants the unity, integrity and
territorial integrity of the country, which if it is to be sustainable,
cannot but entail recognition of the rightful place—neither exclusive
nor domineering–of the Sinhalese.

It recognizes that the Sinhalese are a very old nation, with an old
language, a long continuous written history and are heirs to a highly
developed ancient civilization. They exist in a large collective only on
the island of Sri Lanka. Their language is spoken by a large collective
only on this island. They are two thirds of the population of the
island. This is their home and the only one they have. In the sub-region
and the region as a whole, the Sinhalese are a minority, dwarfed by the
landmass and populace next door in Tamil Nadu from which incursions and
annexations have originated many times in Sinhala history and have been
responsible for the collapse of the great hydraulic civilizations and
the retreat of the capital. This is the geography and history of the
Sinhalese.

A Sri Lankan nation cannot be created by Sinhala Buddhist
civilization alone, but history and culture, demography and democracy
have conferred a central role upon the Sinhala Buddhist people. To make
or regard this as exclusive is chauvinism even racism, but to strive for
a Sri Lankan nation of which the Sinhala nation and Sinhala Buddhist
culture and civilization are not recognized as the core, is ridiculously
artificial and dis-organic.

Most certainly, democracy cannot trample upon rights of the
minorities but nor can democracy be misused or overlooked to install the
rule of a minority and to marginalize the Sinhala majority and its
interests. A minority or minority bloc cannot be turned into a majority,
nor can a majority be turned into a minority. A majority cannot be
cowed into behaving as if it were a minority in its own country (by
which I do not mean the country belongs exclusively to the majority).

Minister
Mahinda Samarasinghe and Ambassador Dayan Jayatilleka at UNHRC special
session on Sri Lanka, in Geneva on May 26, 2009.-pic courtesy: Getty
images

Democracy cannot be manipulated to trample on the natural role and
rightful status of the majority. Still less can the social minorities,
including classes and elites, be enthroned over the majority with
Western support, as was the case under colonialism and the
neocolonialism until 1956. It must be remembered that nations,
especially ancient ones such as the Sinhala nation, have a much older
existence than democracy even in ancient Greece.

A majority on this island, in the modern world–system and its
regional subsystem, the Sinhalese are a structurally marginal minority.
This is their—our—existential situation.
One of Mahinda Rajapaksa’s great historical merits was to leverage
the weight of a rising China and resurgent Russia to compensate for that
structurally marginal situation of the Sinhalese and offset the
systemic advantage that secessionist Tamil nationalism enjoyed owing to
its numbers in Tamil Nadu and its embedding within the Western
democracies. Here he was only following perhaps instinctively, the
dictum of Kautilya, that the main threat to any state comes from its
immediate neighbor– one with whom the given state shares a border– and
that this threat must be countervailed by allying with a power that is
further afield and with which the given state has no border.

It is the triangle of the factors (A) a strong leader from the Ruhuna
(B) the Executive Presidential System and (C) the alliance with Eurasia
i.e. China and Russia, that enabled the Sri Lankan State, its army, and
the Sinhala nation to defeat the fascist-separatist LTTE, warding off
Western pressures for a cessation of hostilities and a return to
negotiation.
It is no accident that factors (A) and (C) have been overturned and
that factor (B) is sought to be downsized if not dismantled by today’s
elected puppet administration. Whom does it benefit and what will be the
strategic and historical fate of the Sinhala nation? What will be
their—our–existential destiny